Fiction

An Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard

Sep 23, 2018|5:00pm

This event has been canceled.

This event has already taken place.

Zadie Smith calls his work crack. Jeffrey Eugenides says it broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel. Readers around the world have flocked to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s nearly 3,500-page epic hypnotic journey through life as an artist as he’s lived it. Highly confessional and irresistibly beautiful, Knausgaard mines the large and small moments of his own narrative from grappling with death, love, art, and fear to going all-in on the mundane, intimate details of everyday existence. With its fierce honesty and ambitious vision, the six-part My Struggle series transcends all genres of first-person writing and forever changes the relationship between author and reader. On the occasion of the publication of the long awaited final installment in the series—Book Six, which confronts the impact of blurring the line between private and public—the Norwegian writer makes a rare West Coast appearance to share his most recent work on the Library Foundation of Los Angeles ALOUD stage. Join us for a conversation between Los Angeles Review of Books Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz and Knausgaard on this monumental work and the radical act of total transparency.

~~Co-presented with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, JACCC, and LARB.~~

Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of the World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Prize. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece, is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages. In Book Six, Knausgaard grapples directly with the consequences of his transgressive blurring of public and private. The book is an exploration of literature itself and of the profound – and at times startling – connection between writer and reader. Knausgaard writes regularly for The New York Times Magazine. In 2010, he co-founded the Norwegian independent publishing house Pelikanen.

Author

Tom Lutz

Tom Lutz is the Editor in Chief of Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World, Doing Nothing, And the Monkey Learned Nothing, and other books. He teaches at UC Riverside, is the executive director of the LARB/USC Publishing Workshop, and is just launching LARB Books.